AFRICA SPEAKS

Listen to AFRICA SPEAKS by Bo Diddley.

There's something wrong when I'm reading a book instead of watching the Super Bowl. How about let's not dwell on that and instead say when a cool Bo Diddley song this is. Especially since if I didn't tell you it was Bo Diddley, you wouldn't have known. No guitars, no lyrics (some singing, kinda). The funkiness is a good hint but not sufficient. Play it loud.

Now, back to pretending like watching the E Street Band is a big deal.

SIGNIFYING BLUES (EXTENDED VERSION)

Listen to SIGNIFYING BLUES (EXTENDED VERSION) by Bo Diddley.

Your 1959 single "Say Man" was, in a round about way, one of the first rap records?

Uhuh. But it wasn't called rap, it was called 'signifyin''. But the new kids today on the block call it rap and I guess you could say rap is a good name for it since you can't understand a damn thing they're sayin'. I think Eminem is the only one you can understand what he's saying. Will Smith was really good. Sir Mix-A-Lot, you can understand him. But the rest of 'em, you can't understand except that it's dirty,and I don't like the dirty lyrics. That's no good for our youngsters. Let a child be a child until he's no more a child and then he can listen to what he wants to.

Photo: Trip to Upper Manhattan (4).

AFRICA SPEAKS

Listen to AFRICA SPEAKS by Bo Diddley.

Did you encounter much racism in the early days?

In the Fifties, you ran into some ignorant people down South — down behind the ignorant curtain, I call it. You was a sad son of a bitch if you couldn't fix you own car then, 'cause if it broke down, you'd be sittin' off in the bushes, and the service-station cat would just be sittin' up there lookin' at you. The crap that we went through to try to bring rock & roll to people. And all these dudes that's running around now tryin' to claim the shit — they ain't got no business claimin' nothin',' cause they didn't do it. We were the pioneers, and we went through hell and high water to make this shit happen. We went through some heavy changes. I had guns put up to my head, man; run out of town, and I still don't know why.

Where was that?

Right goin' into Arkansas, the day after President Kennedy got shot. We were runnin' out of gas, so we parked at this gas station at night and we were waitin' for it to open up in the mornin'. So by 7:30 or 8:00 there were four or five white guys standin' on the corner, like they were waitin' on somebody to pick 'em up, and we were sittin' there in this big, long, stretched-out Chevrolet with eight doors on it. They ain't botherin' us, and we ain't botherin' them. The gas station still ain't open yet, so me and the driver decided to mosey across the street to look at this thrift shop over there. Just about the time we got to the middle of the street, I heard this guy hollerin', "Hey, you! Whatta you lookin' at?" I looked around and didn't see nobody, so we went on across the street. Then we walked back, and just as we got maybe ten feet away from the car, we could see this old man run-nin' out across this field and down this hill, hollerin', "Hey, you all, what choo doin' there? What're you lookin' for?" So I stopped and looked at him, and I pointed — "Me?" He said, "Yeah, you. Wait a minute."

And when he got there, this old man pulled out this great big old gun and stuck it up to my head. Now, if you've ever had a gun put up to your head, the barrel of a .38 looks like a wind tunnel or somethin' when somebody stick it in your face — it gets real big, you understand? And this old man told me, "I want you to get out of town. Ain't none of y'all around here, and y'all get a-movin'."

See, again, that was a time when God carried my booty on his back. Because this was the most horrible experience a man could ever have, for no particular reason. Nothin' should have been that bad. But, see, people back then, this is what they thought — they were taught this. They were raised that way. They didn't know. They thought they were right. It's different now. The people down here in the South now is got their shit together. Everybody's fine; everybody gets along beautiful, and I'm so happy that that's what's happened. But you can always find a fool — you can find a fool in church, you understand? And there's some running' around right now, man, that's still fucked up, and it shouldn't be. I don't see color, you know? But that was the thing we had to go through. And not just black people; white people, too, if they let their hair grow long or something.

I don't understand why Americans do this — they love to pick at one another, you know? I think we'd be better off if we exercised the idea that that man's a free man, just like I am, and if he want to wear his hair down to his asshole, that's his business. It ain't botherin' me — I ain't gotta sleep with him, you dig? Leave him alone. And if you don't want him in your house, just say, "Hey, you can come in, but the hair gotta stay out."

Photo: Trip to Upper Manhattan (3).

LOOK AT GRANDMA

Listen to LOOK AT GRANDMA by Bo Diddley.

"I tell young musicians, 'Don't trust nobody but your mama,' " he says as we leave the hotel and slide into the back seat of a car. "And even then, look at her real good."

As we run errands in Manhattan -- combing the street stalls of Fourteenth Street for bargain clothing and B&H Photo for discount video-camera accessories -- Diddley never stops trying to keep me entertained. Whenever a silence looms, he will ask, "What do you want to know?" or he will start singing one of his hits, or he'll just chuckle and say, "Rock & roll." His manner is easygoing, and despite the fact that the credit and royalties he wants will probably not come in his lifetime, he has not stopped caring or turned into a money-motivated hack, like many musicians on the oldies circuit. Every performance is just as much a battle to him as it was fifty years ago.

"I had a woman in the audience the other night in Oklahoma, sitting all stiff while everyone around her was moving and clapping," he booms as we drive through midtown. "She looked like she was married to some dude who had her stuck in the house for years. I told her, 'No, no, no, you can't sit on the front row and look like you swallowed a liver. You've got to smile, baby, because you are pretty.' " He concludes, "She started grinning, and she started clapping along with the music, man. I got her." He beams and claps his hands together. "I got through."

Photo: Trip to Upper Manhattan (2).

WE'RE GONNA GET MARRIED

Listen to WE'RE GONNA GET MARRIED by Bo Diddley.

Nerve: Analyzing your music, I find that there’s been a lot of humor in there...

BO: Oh yes, I’m doing that again now. I have a girl that I’m working with called Tiffany (not THAT Tiffany) and we puttin’ comedy in there. I’m teaching her how to do it, so she doesn’t sing, so she’s talkin’ the song out. Like I got this song called “Leave”. It’s about a man, that his old lady tells him to leave, to get away from her, she’s had enough of his mess. You know? And it’s funny. Like my old songs where I used to have Cookie. Cookie’s deceased now. And Jerome (Green) is gone. You know, all the people that used to do that with me is gone. (the child on Bo’s end starts crying again) BO: Hold on a minute. (to the child): You got to leave baby, I’m talking on the phone. Go in the kitchen and sit there. You gotta quit cryin’ ‘cos I can’t hear the Man. OK? Look at TV... OK, go ahead man.

Nerve: Back to the humor thing, was Fats Waller ever an influence on you at all?

BO: No way! Don’t ever ask me if someone was an influence! I influenced other guys. I didn’t listen to nobody that I sound like. I sound like ME! Nobody else. (laughs)

Nerve: Back to the Chess era, I’ve always been curious about the artist that did the LP covers, Don Bronstein...

BO: I have no idea who in the hell he is. These guys did something when I was not in town, a lot of it. These guys came out with these screwed up paintings, drawings and shit. Y’know, something that I never OK’d or looked at until the damn thing was handed to me when I walked in... “Oh we got your new album”, and that’s depressing, you know? And I had no say-so.

Nerve: Some of your songs look at the political landscape of the day. Like “Hey, Khruschev”...

BO: That’s REAL old.

Nerve: What do you make of the world today?

BO: Well I got one that I was getting ready to do, and I quit foolin’ with it because I was going through a divorce. It’s called “My Eagle Is Pissed’”. About the Saddam Hussein mess, you know? Meanin’ the United States is pissed off. About what happened with the twin towers. I never thought that people would do that kind of shit.

Photo: Trip to Upper Manhattan (1).

BO'S VACATION

Listen to BO'S VACATION by Bo Diddley.

We're going on vacation for a few days, but thanks to the magic of FUTURE POST, the blog (and Bo) will keep you company while we're gone.

Bo, if someone from Mars came down to Earth and wanted to know what rock & roll was, how would you define it?

What did you say?

If someone from Mars wanted to know what rock & roll was, what would you tell them?

That's what I thought you said.

What I mean is, What is rock & roll in your opinion?

It's music, baby. Happy music. And classical music is music-music. In other words, classical music is the stuff by cats that have deceased, but their music lives on. Rock & roll is the other range, the other step. And I feel like my music will live on after I decease, too. But wait a minute — I ain't plannin' on goin' nowhere too soon, you dig? 'Cause I'm feelin' like the Rock of Gibraltar, brother.

What do you want to be remembered for?

Why? Where am I gone? I don't like that question, sorry. Being remembered, like I'm goin' out the door any minute…

…well, hopefully not.

Hee! I ain't goin nowhere, man. I am so superstitious about that, as I am about wills. When you do a will it tells me that you've just started descending into neverland. Understand me? That's my belief. Alot of people say I shouldn't think that way, but let them do it the way they wanna do it and I'll do it the way I wanna do it cos I ain't ready to pull the plug yet. I'm chained to the plug. You could walk around the corner and somebody could say to you "Man, Bo's just dropped dead". And you'd probably say "What? You're full of shit, I was just talkin' to him two minutes ago". But that's the way it is.

We never know when we're gone, and I'm very superstitious about playing around with anything that means I'm out the door for the last time. I'll talk about anything but that. See, I remember Sam Cooke sayin' that he was hangin' up his rock'n'roll shoes and this chick killed him. The chick shot him, man! To me, superstition, that means something. You dig?

Photo: Street signs (4).

CADILLAC

Listen to CADILLAC by Bo Diddley.

From an obituary in the New Mexico Independent, discussing an interview Bo Diddley had given a few years back:

He said he'd had trouble collecting royalties on his Chess Records classics like "Who Do You Love" and "Diddley Wah Diddley", and even though he was happier with MCA Records, the money was "still not up to par."

"I'm talking about my livelihood.
...

The day of the interview, Diddley said he had discovered a "collections" type album featuring a Bo Diddley tune, and he and MCA Records hadn't been consulted.

"You know, if I went out and started making Cadillacs without the Cadillac company's OK, I'd be in jail before the sun came up." Diddley said the lack of decent royalties kept his children from going to college.

But several of those children followed in his footsteps as musicians and the music took Diddley all over the world and to some unlikely venues. One of the more unusual inclusions in his press packet from 1987 is a copy of the letter Diddley received from former Republican National Committee Chairman Lee Atwater, thanking the rocker for performing and allowing Atwater to join him at the Celebration for Young Americans event during George H.W. Bush's inauguration. "You proved that you are the originator!" Atwater gushed in a handwritten note below his signature.

"That was beautiful. America is a beautiful country," Diddley said of the event.

Photo: Street signs (3).

ELEPHANT MAN

Listen to ELEPHANT MAN by Bo Diddley.

""I got some shocking things I want to do before I decide to say, 'Hey, I'm giving up,' " he says as we climb into his Ford minivan, which is equipped with a Diddley-built wooden console full of drink and map holders. "But I'm not doing anything at the moment because I have a very undecided problem. They call it a matrimony problem. I'm going through a separation, a divorce, whatever you want to call it." In his deep, rich voice, Diddley explains that he has decided to lay low creatively, in case the courts decide that his fourth wife should have a piece of any new project.

We pull into the driveway of an old white house. Lola, a white pit bull missing an eye, greets us.

There is only one item in his hallway: an overturned washtub with a three-foot board screwed into the side. Running between the center of the washtub and the top of the board is a nylon string. Diddley steps up to the washtub bass and begins picking at the string, adjusting the pitch by tilting the plank backward and forward. Whenever he gets a particularly resonant sound, he chuckles happily. We are in Bo Diddley's playpen now.

In the first room off the hallway is a giant amplifier, at least six feet long, that Diddley made. It sits next to another one of his inventions. "It's a board game," Diddley says, gesturing to a giant wooden tabletop covered with squares of writing. "The Bo Diddley Horse Racing Game."

"If I put the guitar down today or tomorrow, I would not starve," Diddley continues as he leads me to the next room, his studio. "I know too many damn things. I can decorate. I can cook. I can do electronics and wire any kind of electric shit. I can figure anything out."

Leaning against the studio wall is a gorgeous square guitar made of blond wood and covered with eagle stickers. His picks, which he rarely uses, are coated with Velcro and attached to a Velcro patch on the side of the instrument. Next to it is a guitar with a misshapen head that's at least two feet long. Inset into this surreal instrument is a CD player, which has been rigged to play backing tracks while the guitar is played.

"I built that motherfucker, but I built that motherfucker too big," Diddley says, sighing.

He sits behind a desk strewn with recording equipment: a Mackie mixing board, a sixteen-track reel-to-reel recorder, a cassette deck, keyboards and half a dozen effects. On a nearby shelf there are dozens of boxes of Ampex tapes stacked in unwieldy piles, dated from 1958 to the present. "See all that over there," Diddley says, gesturing lazily at the shelf. "That's stuff people ain't heard before."

Diddley turns on a drum machine and picks up a microphone. What follows is a rare insight into the musical mind that helped invent rock & roll. His performance lasts nearly two hours.

The man making music before me is not the Bo Diddley I've seen onstage countless times, leading a band through classic blues and rock numbers, with a little rap mixed in. This Diddley is a low-fidelity genius, a do-it-yourself musical tinkerer, a cross between a children's entertainer and a scatological comedian.

The drum machine churns out a "Rock the Bells"-style beat as Diddley raps verse after verse of a nursery rhyme involving the three little pigs, who call Bo Diddley for help when confronted by a big bad wolf. His voice, laden with effects to sound like a chorus of four, booms through the speakers. "I don't care who you are," he sings as the wolf. "Bo Diddley, I'll eat you and your guitar."

Without changing the beat, he begins rapping dirty rhyming verses. "Two old maids was playing in the sand/One told the other, 'I wish you was a man'/One said, the other said, 'I ain't no man/But hold still baby, I'll do the best I can.' "

In another verse, a rooster tells a bow-legged duck, "You ain't good-looking, but you sure can doo-doo-doo." He covers up a swear word in each couplet with innocent singing or an innocuous rhyming word.

When Diddley finishes, he tells me, "That's the stuff I used to do as a kid.""

Photo: Street signs (2).

I'VE HAD IT HARD

Listen to I'VE HAD IT HARD by Bo Diddley.

It's been a tough weekend for celebrity deaths, but I want to go back a few news cycles and reflect on a legend who passed not long ago, but whose death is no longer in the headlines: Bo Diddley.

If I was writing a novel or a term paper, I might go back and erase and revise that sentence (and this one), but since I'm not, let me restate what I want to do: Since Bo Diddley died, there have been a lot of interesting reflections and surveys on and about his music. I read a lot of them, and heard a lot of great music I've never heard before. So for the next couple of weeks, I'd like to share a little bit of what I've heard, and learned.

First up is I've Had It Hard. I haven't seen anyone blog about this one, actually. This is one of my own personal favorites. It's from the early 1970s, long after Bo was at the center of the music scene, and probably past his creative peak. I've Had It Hard certainly doesn't have any... progressive aspects, but that's the thing I love most about the song. Bo Diddley was so comfortable, so in control of his persona, that he could completely inhabit these songs, completely drive the song by force of personality (I feel like I've used that phrase before, but it still fits here), so much so that he used the sound of his own name as the main hook, and it completely works.

Photo: Street signs (1).